High Price Tag for Settlers’ Eviction

Jerusalem’s mayor threatened last week to demolish 200 homes in Palestinian
neighborhoods of the city in an act even he conceded would probably bring long-simmering
tensions over housing in East Jerusalem to a boil.

His uncompromising stance is the latest stage in a protracted legal battle
over a single building towering above the jumble of modest homes of Silwan,
a deprived and overcrowded Palestinian community lying just outside the Old
City walls, in the shadow of the silver-topped al-Aqsa mosque.

Beit Yehonatan, or Jonathan’s House, is distinctive not only for its height
– at seven stories, it is at least three floors taller than its neighbors –
but also for the Israeli flag draped from the roof to the street.

The settlement outpost, named for Jonathan Pollard, serving a life sentence
in the U.S. for spying on Israel’s behalf in the 1980s, has been home to eight
Jewish families since 2004, when it was built without a license by an extremist
settler organization known as Ateret Cohanim.

Beit Yehonatan is one of dozens of settler-occupied homes springing up in
Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem, most of them takeovers of Palestinian
homes.

Critics say the intent of these "outposts," together with the large
settlements of East Jerusalem built by the state and home to nearly 200,000
Jews, is to foil any peace agreement that might one day offer the Palestinians
a meaningful state with Jerusalem as its capital.

But exceptionally for the settlers, who are used to a mix of overt and covert
assistance from officials, the inhabitants of Beit Yehonatan are at risk of
being evicted from their home, two years after an "urgent" enforcement
order was issued by the Israeli Supreme Court.

Last week Nir Barkat, Jerusalem’s mayor, finally agreed "under protest"
to seal Beit Yehonatan amid mounting pressure from an array of legal officials.
Barkat had been fighting strenuously against implementing the court order,
aided by senior members of the parliament, the police, and even Benjamin Netanyahu,
the Israeli prime minister, who opposed his own attorney general’s advice by
declaring Beit Yehonatan’s future "a purely municipal matter."

But the mayor has not simply capitulated. He warned that Beit Yehonatan would
be evacuated only on condition that more than 200 demolition orders on Palestinian
homes, most of them in Silwan, were carried out at the same time. He argued
that he had to avoid any impression that the law was being enforced in a "discriminatory"
manner against Jews.

Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said
Barkat’s idea of fairness was "ridiculous."

"In the past 15 years there have been more than a thousand Palestinian
homes demolished in East Jerusalem versus absolutely no settler homes,"
he said. "In fact, no settlers have ever lost their home in East Jerusalem."

In making his announcement, Barkat admitted that the 200 demolitions would
trigger "a strong possibility for conflict." Palestinians in East
Jerusalem are already seething over decades of planning restrictions that have
forced many of them to build or extend homes illegally because it is all but
impossible to get permits from the Israeli authorities.

Halper said the municipality had classified 22,000 Palestinian homes in East
Jerusalem as illegal, even as it also assessed a shortage of 25,000 homes for
the city’s 250,000-strong Palestinian population.

The homes targeted for demolition include Palestinian houses around Beit Yehonatan
that violate planning restrictions that allow families to build only two floors;
despite the restriction, many houses have four stories and owners pay fines.

In addition, the city council wants to demolish 88 homes in a small area called
Bustan that the municipality claims is in danger of flooding.

Zeinab Jaber lives next to Beit Yehonatan in the home she was born in 61 years
ago. The building was declared illegal 20 years ago, after it was extended
to four stories to accommodate he in the hope of warding off destruction.

Her son Amjad, 32, married with two young sons, said he did not dare miss
a payment. "It’s simple: if you don’t pay, you’ll end up in prison."

"What is there for the settlers here?" Mrs. Jaber asked. "They
are only here because they want to take this place from us. They won’t be happy
till we leave."

On the opposite slope across the valley from Beit Yehonatan, Mohammed Jalajil,
48, said he did not doubt that the municipality would demolish the 200 homes.
He, his wife, and their five children have been crammed into a room in a relative’s
apartment since their own house was demolished seven years ago.

Jalajil, 48, said: "It was only months after they took our house from
us that I saw the settlers building theirs nearby. My lawyer tells me that,
even though my house is gone, I won’t have paid off my fines for another 10
years."

If Barkat follows through with his threat, the demolitions will prompt a rebuke
from the international community. Last month, France and the United States
joined the UN in denouncing more than 100 demolitions in East Jerusalem over
the past three months.

The mayor’s decision, warned Meir Margalit, a Jerusalem city councilor, was
comparable to the "price tag" policy of the settlers in the West
Bank, who have attacked Palestinian villages in retaliation against official
attempts to dismantle a few of the settlement outposts dotting Palestinian
territory.

"But the difference here is that the price tag is being levied not by
the settlers themselves but by the municipality and the government on their
behalf," he said.

Yesterday the municipality was due to issue a seven-day evacuation notice
to the inhabitants of Beit Yehonatan, but the operation was canceled at the
last minute when police refused to cooperate.

Frictions have been growing in Silwan for several years over the activities
of another settler organization, Elad, which, with official backing, has been
building an archaeological park known as the City of David in the midst of
the Palestinian neighborhood. As Palestinians have been pushed out, at least
80 Jewish families have moved into homes nearby.

As Elad entrenches itself in Silwan, Beit Yehonatan has proved more difficult
to secure. "Usually the settlers present a façade of legality to
what they do," Halper said. "The problem here is that they built
in an overtly illegal manner, without a permit and way over the building height
restrictions."

Barkat’s resistance to evicting Beit Yehonatan’s inhabitants was highlighted
last month when he tried to stave off legal pressure by proposing a new planning
policy to legalize unlicensed buildings in Silwan. The mayor proposed that
the rules limiting homes to two stories be revised to four.

The reform would have applied to Beit Yehonatan first, sealing its top three
stories but allowing the Jewish families to inhabit the rest of the building.

Although Barkat promised that illegal Palestinian buildings would also be
saved, Ir Amim, an Israeli human rights groups, dismissed the mayor’s claim.

The overwhelming majority of Palestinian homes would fail to qualify because
land registry documents are missing for the area and a range of requirements
on car parking, access roads, and sewerage connections are "impossible"
to meet, Orly Noy, a spokeswoman, wrote in the Ha’aretz newspaper last
month.

She added that Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem lacked 70km of sewage pipes
and that not a single new road had been paved in their neighborhoods since
Israel’s occupation in 1967.

A planning map of East Jerusalem drawn up recently by the Jerusalem municipality
came to light last month, as Barkat was promising to legalize buildings, showing
that more than 300 homes – most of them in Silwan – were facing imminent demolition.

A version of this article originally appeared in The
National, published in Abu Dhabi.